Electronic communication services, such as local and long distance telephone service, television service, and radio service have been available to consumers for years, and have been widely adopted and used. These longstanding communication services are characterized by ease of operation, limited user interfaces, and relatively high reliability. These factors may help explain why such services have been widely adopted by a large number of people, to the point where television, telephone and radio service is ubiquitous in most countries.
However, due in part to their simplicity, traditional communication services have been limited in many ways. For example, traditional telephone service relies on wireline connections, which may limit the mobility of users. Likewise, traditional television service provides a one-way flow of information from broadcaster to viewers, with little or no ability for viewers to configure the service according to personal preferences.
In recent years, traditional communication services have become more flexible, intelligent, and feature-rich. For example, traditional wireline telephone service providers now offer enhanced services such as call forwarding, call waiting, caller ID, voicemail and the like. Similarly, with the advent of broadband television services through cable and satellite networks, television service providers now offer configurable on-demand television services to subscribers.
At the same time as traditional communication services have become more flexible, intelligent, and feature-rich, the types of available communication services have proliferated, driven in large part by the expansion of the internet. For example in addition to enhanced telephone, television and radio services, a consumer may have access to the internet for email communication, instant messaging, video chat, voice over IP (VoIP) telephony, television over IP (IPTV), and/or other communication services. In addition, wireless communication services have provided additional options for both voice communication and data communication and messaging using, for example, short message service (SMS) and/or multimedia message service (MMS) communications.
In fact, communication services have proliferated to the point where it may be difficult and/or time consuming for a user to manage all of the different communication services that are available to the user. It may be particularly difficult for a user to manage a variety of communication services that have different user interfaces and/or software applications relating thereto. From the perspective of the service provider, a primary concern is that users may be less likely to adopt new communication services that are seen as complex and/or that operate differently from communication services with which they are more familiar.
Accordingly, there continues to exist a need in the art to provide improved interaction between different communications services and/or software applications relating thereto.